


Rest for the Wicked

by wizardslexicon



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, FLARP, Gen, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 08:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2341202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wizardslexicon/pseuds/wizardslexicon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>sisters</i>- (Alternian) <strong><i>n., pl.</i></strong><br/>1. Any two female trolls with an unusually close emotional bond.<br/>2. Two female trolls sharing the responsibility of feeding a lusus (archaic).</p>
<p>or, The Agonies of Troll Pilate</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rest for the Wicked

You can see it through sightless eyes: her back as her buzzing wings scatter bright blueberry dust through the Veil. The Thief goes to challenge the Slayer. And the Slayer’s keen eyes follow her path back to where you and your friends hide in the darkness, to put you all to his terrible sword. You can smell her shock, her horror at your body. You can smell her anger, and the chance, even if miniscule, of victory at the cost of oblivion. 

You cannot allow it. 

You drive the cane forward, between the shoulder blades. It’s not as cruel as how she killed Tavros (the lead-weighted tip of his lance forces the path of insertion downward, tearing a cruel wound that becomes crueler if the offending object is removed. You are not so vindictive. Your cane is as straight as justice, and you kill with neither mercy nor malice.) Your cane comes out of her back as straight as it enters, covered in rich cobalt, and you watch as she sags, falls face first into a widening pile of blood.

God, but she’s so _small_. Just a wiggler, six sweeps, barely even hatched. And now she is dead, at the flip of a scratched caegar.

 

The meteor is quiet. Day or night; what you call it doesn’t matter, but everyone is on about the same sleep schedule, and Gamzee is leaving you to stew in your own teal bruises and misery. The only sound is the hum of the computer terminals keeping you all alive in the void, and the whispers of the Noble Circle writhing above. You come here often.

The hiss of metal adds a new sound to the orchestra of silence, and you smell the blade of your cane. No matter how many times you clean it, there’s always a tiny trace of cobalt left against gleaming silver, with a tenacity that matches its owner. A black mark against your justice, enough to tip the scales. You wonder why her body left no stain on the ground you stand on, why you can’t feel the coolness her corpse left here.

You breathe in the air she breathed last, and remember.

 

It is your god-knows-how-muchth FLARP campaign, and you are doing what you do best: orchestrating the demise of the wicked. You need no psychic abilities to use people against themselves. They stumble into your cane, your noose: all the wrongdoers of the world, the cruel and the evil. You are very discriminatory. You do not slay the innocent, and you never miss a target.

You meet her when she’s five. Wild haired, with an obvious lack of respect for personal hygiene. No troll would allow another to stand behind them with scissors, so you all cut your own wiry hair. Yours is always immaculate, curled at the ends and carefully symmetrical, as straight on the sides as your horns. Hers, though, is wild, as though she simply allows it to grow as it will and hacks at it with a knife occasionally. No layering at all. It smells terrible.

But there is a peculiar vitality to Vriska Serket. Her pathetic mismatched horns, the unattractive sign of a mutation, make her something of an outcast among the harshly political blues, and her blood makes her different among the lowbloods. But you are teal with perfect horns, and she is cobalt with flawed ones, and so you complement each other. She plays FLARP like you do, justly, but taking your victims’ bodies away for her own purposes.

Time passes. She pushes more, for more victims, more of the cruel to dispatch. You can take five in one day, and it is not enough. She murmurs about “growing”, and “hunger” incessantly. You are not stupid, you had thought then. She has a demanding lusus, no doubt, and is worried for its safety.

It’s the day she kills an informant that you begin to worry. Her hooked sword tears out of their ribcage with a nasty ripping sound, and olive blood pours over her hands, shocking her with the heat of it.

“We do not kill the innocent, Marquise!” you say, admonishing. She grins, tips her tricorn hat to you.

“Spinneret Mindfang never met a rat she liked, Neophyte.” And you do not discuss it. But she does not kill any more informants, and one day she asks if she can stay in your hive, just for a few nights, because she doesn’t want to get her lusus’ sickness. You sincerely doubt her lusus is sick, but you don’t push.

You realize the problem nights later, when one of your campaigns goes wrong: this session is near her castle, and a bloated white spider (you wonder, that Vriska is able to feed such a monster) crawls from the base of the cliffs, screaming in hunger. You and Vriska together kill all the others players, sate the beast with fresh blood and flesh. It’s the last night Vriska ever spends in your hive, and when you slip out of your FLARP outfit and into your recuperacoon, you hear her start to follow.

Sopor matches blood temperature, so she starts at the unusual warmth when she crawls in with you. Naked, slim, and flat-chested, the both of you, nowhere near the growth or maturity for flushed or caliginous relations, even with the muscles battle provides. When she brushes sopor over your face and through your hair, you are going to remark on the unusual paleness of the gesture until she leans up to your pointed ear and whispers, “Sisters.”

That is when her killings start to become less discriminatory.

Her lies are obvious. “He stole an item from a newbie,” she might say, or “I saw him backstab his team member when you weren’t looking, Redglare.” But eventually even the lies stop. She makes corpses as if she’s going to line them around the walls of her immense hive, use bones like you use dragon scales. But you know that that spider is too large to hunt for itself, now. Every corpse she steals goes down that mandibled maw, and she builds a persona to justify it: the cruel, vicious Mindfang. But she never turns her die on you.

And, even after she steals your eyes, and you take seven of hers with interest, she never stops calling you her sister.

 

You pull the dracon hood down low over your eyes. When you killed her, it was just. It simply never occurred to you that the just action and the right action might be different things entirely.

You resheathe your cane. It doesn’t matter if cobalt remains on that blade where the blood of hundreds of innocents did not. It doesn’t matter if the only thing your neurons see now is the bubbles in the pool of blood left by her abortive dying breaths. All that matters is that she was your sister, she is dead, and you were wrong to kill her, no matter what paradox space thought on the matter. You have no eyes, but clear sight was your natural gift, and no darkness can damage the way you see.

You are Terezi Pyrope, and when you cry, you almost wish you had vision to blur.

 


End file.
